Short version: there was no Moose, no Moo, Catalyst was still new and relatively unknown, no PSGI, no Dancer, DBIx::Class was just forking from Class::DBI, no Mojolicious, the template space was completely stalled, the file handling space was old school File::Find, tools like Proc::Daemon were fairly sucky and unlikely to work on your platform (it’s an *excellent* tool today), CGI.pm had been the defacto standard for 15 years (counting cgi-lib). Circa that time, the core Perl team was in disarray and regular releases were a fantasy. Best practices was a fairly foreign cultural concept still—it’s often in stark contrast to TIMTOWTDI—and just gaining traction. There is hardly any generic code from 2005—not talking custom algorithms, one-offs, etc—that couldn’t be better written with the CPAN and generally accepted practices of today. Perl had one foot solidly in the grave around 2003. Soon thereafter it started to experience a renaissance that is still in progress.